Case Cazuffi-Rella

Two adjoining houses frame the porticoed corner of Piazza Duomo, their painted facades forming a Renaissance moral programme. Modernised around 1530 for a jurist of the Cazuffi family and attributed to Marcello Fogolino, the facades present allegories of Fortune, Occasion and Virtue above Trento's main square.

Why it matters

The paired houses form the most important domus picta of Renaissance Trento. Modernised in the Renaissance taste for guests of the Council of Trent, they preserve a complex sixteenth-century fresco cycle across several storeys. The Latin cartouches place its moral imagery within the public life of Piazza Duomo.

What to notice

The left facade shows Geryon and the allegories of Fortune, Occasion and Nemesis above Damocles at the table of Dionysius. The right presents Virtue and Time, the Triumphs of Love, and Apollo with Abundance, culminating in the Scala della Virtù with Latin inscriptions. Monochrome figures in chiaroscuro stand against a ground that was once azurite blue, now almost entirely lost. A Gothic frieze near the top and the Cazuffi coat of arms at the corner toward Via Belenzani preserve traces of the earlier house and its owners.

Context and history

The Cazuffi, a family from Tuenno in Val di Non, had a documented presence in Trento from the late fourteenth century; their house near the Duomo has fourteenth- to fifteenth-century origins, with an earlier painted layer and a probable fourteenth-century coat of arms surfacing beneath the sixteenth-century work. Around 1530 Tommaso Cazuffi, a doctor of laws who served repeatedly as city consul, modernised the building in the Renaissance taste and commissioned the famous chiaroscuro facades, attributed to Marcello Fogolino — a Vicenza-born painter who had reached Trento around 1527 and was then frescoing the Magno Palazzo for Prince-Bishop Bernardo Cles. The imagery draws on Andrea Alciati's Emblematum Liber of 1531, presenting a moral programme in a public setting.